In the field of computer hardware and software technology, a virtual machine is a software implementation of a machine (computer) that executes program instructions like a real machine. Virtual machine technology allows for the sharing of, between multiple virtual machines, the physical resources underlying the virtual machines.
In virtual machine environments, storage volumes within the virtual machines contain data items that need to be accessed and scanned. Unfortunately, accessing the underlying contents of a storage volume can be very resource intensive, reducing the performance of a virtual machine and other operations within a virtual machine environment.